Get yourself 3 ex-wives, an oxycodone addiction, a discovery of privacy rights after claiming for years such a right doesn’t exist, and approximately 600 affiliates, and you can bullshit people on the radio for $31.25 million a year.

Radley’s column is fine, but we need to think bigger. The problem is the growth of presidential staff itself. The Executive Office of the President has supplanted the cabinet-level departments in prestige and power, yet there’s little to no accountability because of the misguided notion of “executive privilege.”

Your analysis is right on the mark. A press secretary is nothing more than P.R. for the politicians, so how do they communicate with there constituents without something analogous to a press secretary? Would they have time to communicate directly with the press themselves?

Then there’s the problem of getting these weasels to relinquish a clear benefit to themselves. Have we ever heard of a politician giving up something they didn’t have to?